Incidentally, study after recent study..some very large continue to prove no link with vaccines and autism. I've seen two in the last month!
http://io9.com/large-scale-study-co...utm_source=io9_facebook&utm_medium=socialflow
If I'm not mistaken the guy who made the original claims about the links between vaccines and autism through studies he had done pretty much fessed up that it was all bullshit. He falsified data to make the results fit his claims.
Here's the thing, if we just look at America alone, what's the percentage of people who've been vaccinated in the last, oh, 60-80 years? High percentages, right? 80s or 90s? Especially considering some vaccines are required by most public institutions.
How come the claimed problems vaccinations cause aren't an ongoing struggle we've faced during all of this time? How come autism isn't a huge, huge problem in all of our aging people of the Baby Boomer generation? Or the generation before them?
Why is it only *now* vaccines have started causing autism?
Why not centuries ago when vaccines were first starting to be used likely using more toxic additives in a time where they didn't care as much about Lead or Mercury poisoning or were even fully aware of problems related to those two elements?
People want to see the higher number of Autistic persons out there and want an answer and, somehow, have linked it to vaccines. When, really, they could just as well link it to decreased number of pirates in the world. Or the increased use of the Internet, or the frequency of Adam Sandler movies.
So why is Autism "more common"? Because we're better and identifying it. More-over we've greatly expanded what it means spanning from a person who's mostly and utterly locked into their own minds unable to make any communication with the outside world all the way to people completely able to live normal lives but just have some social oddities.
Autism means more than it did even 20 years ago.
It's like cancer. We can certainly make the argument there's more sources of cancer-causing things out there but we've also expanded what cancer means and gotten better at identifying it. Someone who died 100 years ago of "mysterious causes" was shrugged off. Today, that person likely will have been found to have had cancer. So dramatic increases in cancer is, again, more to expanding the diagnosis of it, better understanding of it, and better at finding it and less due to things like cell-phones and power lines.
And really, even if I were to accept that even 1 in 1,000 children get autism due to a vaccination I think that's more acceptable than 500 in 1,000 kids dying from a disease we ended decades ago.
